


blossoms to the wick

by rapture



Category: SMAP
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-27
Updated: 2016-03-27
Packaged: 2018-05-29 09:04:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6368491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rapture/pseuds/rapture
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When they were young they had never thought about the future.</p>
            </blockquote>





	blossoms to the wick

That clear night, they went to dinner together. The concert was over, and it was just the two of them. It had been an accident; in fact Nakai had started to avoid being alone with Kimura, and he often assumed that Kimura was trying, too.

Kimura was different when they were together, and Nakai felt himself shifting too. He was not particularly given to analyzation of his own motives and character, but he was as ever brightly, though partially unconsciously, aware of the rhythms between people. Alone together, they were changed together.

But neither of them were willing to ask staff to come with them, and neither of them were willing to openly refuse to go just because Shingo abandoned their plans with a headache, so together they went. They could talk over their beers, just a loose conversation on the safest topic they had (the concert). It was problematic in a way it never was for Nakai with anyone but Kimura - it was too easy. He hated that it was so easy, that it was hard to draw back from this man. Kimura acted at ease with everyone, but even for him there was a special quality here.

There was too much affecting them, too deeply to let them ever be superficial at length. When the conversation began, they were never awkward at all, even though Nakai for one would have preferred that to this warm easiness. 

He wanted to take Kimura’s hand, and he hated that. Because it was like that between them, he knew that Kimura would let him, even that Kimura wanted it too. They swayed each other like that, when they were alone together.

He could never determine when, exactly, Kimura had made such an impact on him that his eyes refused to turn away even years later. If he thought about it, he could almost recall, or fool himself into recalling, the moment they had met - like the children they had pretended they weren’t, everything had been transient back then, easy to get along and easy to fall out.

But he could never recall when he had begun to hate Kimura, and he couldn’t even bring himself to begin to wonder when he had begun to love Kimura.

 

_He had first noticed Kimura, really noticed him in the way that was bothering them years later in that post-concert izakaya dinner, quite a while after they had first met at lessons. Their group had already been formed, they had just transferred to a new high school for its special celebrity course, and the six of them had begun to wonder when Shingo would be old enough to officially debut. It was an expectant time._

_Of course Nakai and Kimura knew each other quite well by reputation and were familiar with each other in a superficial group cooperation kind of way, but they had never been any closer than any two boys of the same age and group had to be simply because of the circumstances. If he had been asked, Nakai never could have explained what possessed him that day to follow Kimura into an unused classroom after school._

_Like a rat at a water-bottle, Kimura had his cigarette out the window-crack and wore a blank expression over his knobbly nose. He looked so unlike the prancing hair-flipping boy who was seldom scolded by the dance teachers that Nakai went over to tease him for being the kind of punk who smoked at school, and maybe to bum a smoke off him too._

_It was the first time Nakai had seen Kimura without an audience to impress, the first time that even just he himself had not been audience enough for Kimura to resume his performance. They ended up at the conbini in a tumble of conversation - everything came flowing as if it had been dammed up. It hadn’t - not at all - but it rose, and they suddenly found that they liked each other, very much._

_Even though they talked this much, it was without discussion that Kimura followed Nakai home. Suddenly they wanted to be close - suddenly they_ were _close. They had thus far in a brief skimming way simply liked or disliked each other as called for by the occasion or group or passing teenaged argument, but now they had abruptly shifted to something different._

_This was Kimura’s real face. Very assured, very playful, and a little bratty, just like his idol self, but with a reserve in his sweet eyes which had been as of yet untouched by profound emotion. Without realizing it, Nakai unfolded under that raw unfinished gaze._

_Finding nobody home, in the corner they passed another cigarette between themselves. And just like that, instead of passing it again they were kissing. When they drew back, they were smiling. Kimura made to put his arms around Nakai and they were leaning together when they saw that the cigarette was still smoldering. As they scrambled to find an ashtray, they kept on brushing their arms together. It was an exaggerated boyish scramble and not seductive at all, but they were in each other's arms as soon as they managed to stub out the cigarette anyway._

_It was then that they heard Nakai’s brother cursing at his stumble in the entryway, and Nakai smoothed Kimura’s rough shining hair back with lips clumsy in their haste._

 

At the izakaya Nakai paid the bill as hastily as he could manage, which was as soon as they had finished something close to half of the minimal dinner they had ordered. Their conversation was still making him smile; he kept trying to make it a forced fake laugh but it kept slipping back.

The night was damp as they left. Kimura was so alive on stage, his existence so vivid, that although here he was still very awake and he seemingly had not even a tenth of Nakai’s aches and creaks, his post-stage self seemed devastated of its vitality. Even the smoke of his fresh cigarette was sluggish.

Silently, Kimura followed him into the hotel and then into his room, as if it were theirs.

Stretched across the glassy dark covers, his listless limbs became languid. Nakai came over slowly, lining up his shoes carefully and nudging over his suitcase. And then he thought he had better pretend they weren’t headed in any particular direction, so he came as unhesitatingly as he could, and looked at Kimura as much as he wanted to.

Kimura was no longer the devastatingly lovely boy who he had kissed in the bathroom between classes and sometimes during them, but he still had the exact same reckless quality. Even his languid eyes and languid body looked less like they were ready to rest for tomorrow’s performance and more like they would brim up tonight in a parade of energy. 

Kimura kissed him then, straight up. He seldom felt the need to pretend to more hesitation than he felt. Their bodies had been together too much, under too many lights. He would express very real guilt, very real concern for the people outside their bed, and he maybe even had more than he ever showed Nakai, but having decided that they mattered less than this, he never bothered to make it apparent that they mattered at all. 

He drew back a little now, though they were still sitting very close, and gave Nakai a tripping tap on the shoulder, their old signal for “let’s go”.

 

_The first concert after Mori left, they each had their own hotel rooms but they both retreated to Nakai’s. When Nakai came back from planning changes with the staff, Kimura was already waiting. He was an idol here too, as cheesy as it was. Though he was tense, even though he called himself lame, he was an idol here too._

_The unselfconscious indecency of his expression - it had just passed the first brink of captivating the nation at that point, and it had not yet acquired the later confidence of an unbreaking sea of popularity. It coasted instead on the natural feelings of the man, the inborn confidence he had in the motion of his body. Even his pursed plump lips that looked so like an affectation were really more natural than stylized. Rather than asking to be kissed, they simply provoked that sort of feeling without any false intention whatsoever._

_Those were simply Kimura’s natural feelings, and his genius both as an idol and in Nakai’s ugly tan-beige hotel bed was that his natural feelings were always the exact feelings that would draw people to him._

_Nakai kissed that mouth with no pretense, and here he felt rather than saw Kimura’s smile. Immediately Kimura’s hands were in his pants; usually Nakai responded to his half-teasing half-desperate speed with a couple of all-joking swats but tonight he was so infused with Kimura’s nature that he smirked and undid the button himself, for speed._

_The moment Nakai toppled himself into the pre-rumpled sheets was the exact moment that Kimura pulled him down by his already half-dampening shirt. Kimura kissed him again and embraced him with arms that would never again be so soft with youth. His hand, his body were velvet with youth. Around Nakai’s dick those fingers were a little rough with callouses, but their motion was a caress. He didn’t even mind how sticky Kimura was like this… Their hands on each other under the harsh hotel bulbs, they kissed like they were still before a crowd. This was another night, another set of lights, no different from the one before and the one to follow._

_Nakai turned into the pillow…_

_He hated doing this at home, because sometimes the way Kimura twisted at just the right speed in response to his excitement-induced slowness drove him so crazy that he would end up leaving damp impressions upon the pillow. But it was alright here, he was pretending they wouldn’t need to be cleaned up after. It was alright to wrap his other hand around Kimura’s dick too, and try to hold on as best he could. But abruptly Kimura jerked his dick away and his body with it, and pressed his perfect damp mouth around Nakai’s dick, like he wanted to squeeze out every last drop - and Nakai obliged._

_Slyly, he took Nakai’s panting silence as permission to fumble his way up to jerk off all over Nakai’s orgasm stunned face, and then he laughed at the speed with which Nakai fled for the shower._

_As always, when he returned Nakai intruded on Kimura’s lazy afterglow to make him take a shower. That night Kimura went with astonishingly little protest and with even more swagger than usual. When he came back, he merrily started soaking Nakai’s pillow with his dripping hair, and he wouldn’t leave even when Nakai tried to shove him off the bed. In the end, Nakai just fell into bed next to him after a final cursory grope._

_They fell asleep without closing the curtains, but in the morning it was not the blinding sun but Iijima who woke them up. She came in with her own copy of the key, and she hid her surprise well._

_“You’re grown up now,” she said, her eyes never fidgeting. “From now now, I’ll have the managers call you when they need you. You’re adults, you can get up and find your own way.”_

_She didn’t even tell them to be careful, and like the entangled youths they still were, they had taken her omission as their victory._

 

They were older now, and though inside Kimura he had that rushing flowing side still, he had at least learned to paper it over. As for Nakai, he felt breathless and weathered far oftener than before. But tonight, with the thousand-faceted lights in their eyes, they were the men those youths had unfolded into.

Kimura tasted like neither smoke nor their meal but like exquisite starvation. When he pulled Nakai between his thighs, he did it more with the force of this hunger than with his gentle hands. They ground against each other like that, clothes on, awake with the fuel of their long familiarity and the kindling of their kisses.

“Get it inside me,” Kimura said, right away.

Their hands were already unfastening buttons and they were starting to welcome back the old pattern once again, well rehearsed but still bearing the same excited fresh scent with which it had begun. The careless line of that hip - it had lost of dew of their youth - but it was still a lovely line, perfectly smooth. He wanted to possess that line and its owner with his entire body, he wanted to banish the temptation from his bed, he wanted to be subsumed in it forever.

When he tossed away the lube and slid his dick between Kimura’s thighs - their parched gaze together, the same harmony of their slightly slick hands, the taste of every scrap of Kimura - he had to nudge a little harder to work his way in, and they were already breathing faster than the motion of their bodies.

“Harder,” begged Nakai.

With his exquisite responsiveness in all matters sensual, Kimura tilted himself just right to join them together more deeply still, and he met Nakai with full force. Driving into Kimura like this, watching his hair dye itself back black with sweat, must have been the most erotic experience possible. His body was a perfect fit, tight but so welcoming, so ready for this.

Unbidden. unwanted, intolerable, a memory came to Nakai now, just as he spilled himself with a gasp into the waiting heat -

 

_”We could go,” Kimura said, very light._

_“Go where? If you want to shop for sunglasses I’m not going with you!” (He hadn’t understood yet.)_

_And Kimura answered, “Go somewhere. Go away, and be together.”_

_There was a frightening expression upon Kimura’s face that Nakai was vaguely wary of, though he almost recognized it too. Without recalling where, he knew he had seen it before. It had shocked him, although he had realized it wasn’t new._

_“We can do it,” Kimura continued, his voice the perfect speed like he was reading off a half-memorized teleprompter. “Even if it’s not in Japan. Ordinary people do it all the time. It’s ok, they’re fine. Aren’t we ordinary people? Isn’t that the charm, the power of SMAP?”_

_Nakai wanted to shake him then, shake him and shake him until his shining eyes shivered in front of a mirror and he looked at himself, saw that he was someone, and that had happened not because of the company or the managers but because of the zealous vitality etched into every line of that face. But he just said, perfectly peaceably:_

_“Look at yourself, listen to yourself. Even now you’re saying SMAP, SMAP. How could you do it?”_

_And with a quick veil of hopeless anger, in a burst, Kimura retorted, “You couldn’t either!”_

_“No,” Nakai said, “I couldn’t.”_

_And, as it sometimes did, their agreement felt very flat._

_“SMAP is our work, we’re SMAP,” Nakai tried to continue, almost searchingly. “We’re part of it and it’s part of us. It’s what we are, as - as the two of us. You -”_

_“I feel the same. But if there wasn’t SMAP - everything else that’s mine and that I’m responsible for, I could feel like it would be alright to throw away, because -”_

_“Don’t say it!”_

_Silence. Nakai tried to joke, tried to exaggerate the shifting of his eyes in the silence, but it just wouldn’t go, not without an audience. The skin under Kimura’s eyes had been slowly darkening for years already, and everyone was quite used to it, so they didn’t really often think he looked particularly tired; but now the droop of his entire face…_

_“We met because of SMAP anyway,” Nakai said, less because he thought it would pull Kimura’s face back up and more because he didn’t know how else to bolster his argument._

_“Then we have to live the rest of our lives, outside of this, like this doesn’t exist, don’t we? You won’t let this be everything and I won’t continue to live like this, half-assed like it matters but only so far.”_

_“It would drive you crazy,” Nakai agreed, just quickly enough._

_“Is it really alright?” Kimura asked him, like he wasn’t even sure what he wanted to hear._

_Nakai just nodded in response, though he was thinking: You have to live the way you need to, don’t you? Even if it changes the way I live; just like I’ve done this to you, we’ve done this to each other._

_But he didn’t have fire enough to say it._

_Suddenly, he remembered what that expression was - he had seen it once before in his own face, with Kimura’s back to the mirror and the two of them face-to-face. He had happened to glance away with frustration rising into his throat, and he had glimpsed himself in the dirty glass. It was love._

 

Kimura was weak, after all. He thought this with neither condemnation nor pity. What were they doing here, wet and impatient in a post-concert hotel room together, what were they doing when they were colleagues with dozens more colleagues depending on them, when Kimura was married, when they were old and tired? In the end it was because they were weak.

With his rather short legs curled under him, Kimura looked more than ever like the lanky tanned embodiment of long misty summer days. Nakai was more critical of this man than anyone else around him managed to be, and he now wondered if Kimura’s ugly side, this side that was sitting up in someone else’s bed, was brought out by having someone see and understand his flaws. It was strange for Nakai, that his body felt a thoroughly exhausting satisfaction from the amazing concert and the hard fuck, but his mind was still so restless.

“Go take a shower,” he said. (Get out, he didn’t say.) But when the only response was a slow eyelash flutter, he let Kimura lay there wet.

After he showered and thumped his tired legs back over, he saw that Kimura had rolled over, and that was just about the only change. Kimura was still damp, which annoyed him, but it was such a familiar annoyance with Kimura that it pissed him off a lot less than it would with anyone else he slept with. The lines of Kimura’s face were just the same as always, but their arrangement into a certain expression compelled Nakai to murmur:

“I can’t stand to see you lose.”

“You haven’t seen me lose,” Kimura replied. “I’m acting like I haven’t.”

“You can’t pretend endlessly,” Nakai said, and then he thought that wasn’t quite what he had meant so he continued, “Even you can’t pretend endlessly.”

Sharply, Kimura sat half-up and said, “Pretending’s our job, I know how to do it. No one wants to watch the truth. What would that even be, anyway? Something like, it’s a PV and the five of us are standing around all sullen, because every kind of work is a grind when you’ve done it long enough, and the two of us are at opposite ends of the formation because we can’t stop having sex? No, it has to be us dancing in a meadow or some shit - professionally speaking. Our job has poured itself into my lifestyle and molded it, that’s just reality. You don’t want the truth. We’d rather have this, so we’ve got to take it. Don’t tell me I look like I’ve lost.”

Nakai had no proper reply to this, so he just got into bed and told Kimura to go to sleep. And after a couple of minutes, their arms went lax and warm, familiar against each other in the dark. 

 

_He had tried to pretend, at first, that Kimura’s wedding would change everything. But the pale truth was, he was hardly wistful at all, because in his heart he couldn’t feel that he would be lonely, that he would miss Kimura and their familiar time together. He knew it would happen again, deep down. But he turned his mind away from that thought._

_Just last week they had driven out along one of the train lines until they hit one of the abruptly rural bits that always seemed to linger along even the most crowded routes that spread out from Tokyo. On the phone Kimura had asked to go to the beach, though the fall chill was already layering into the winter wind, but once he had sat down in a rush of wet hair and wild scarves he told Nakai to just drive out of the city._

_They had parked and sat together for hours talking with their hands clasped until the early dusk. When they let go they had found their hands numb but warm._

_Remembering the feel of Kimura’s mouth on his - their famished grasp upon each other, the unerring rhythm of their hands, the taste of every scrap of Kimura - it had been so vital, it was still so vital - it was impossible to imagine they could abstain for long._

_Kimura hadn’t told him then, though it was obvious that he had meant to. The news came by text the next morning, when Kimura was still sweet on his tongue and bitter on his mind. He hated Kimura then, for being willing to be marked by their feelings but unwilling to be entirely possessed by them. He knew it was unfair but that unfairness was the only form which could be taken by his own struggle against their closeness._

_But the wedding had already been decided, and his reaction had been more or less determined, too. When they had been perilously young, they had not ever thought about how they would become old, and with that headstrong obliviousness they had not thought about how that youth would linger even in the paths they would later navigate with wearier steps. But even an unknowing decision was a decision._

_Because it was the truth and he thought it might reassure her, he asked for her number and told Kimura’s mother that he would protect her son. Even though his resolve was quite sincere and he knew that he would follow through without fail, in his heart he felt like a liar. He told himself then that it was over, that the message Kimura meant to send was that it’s over. Nakai was dazed, and felt very little, besides that he was a liar._

 

When he woke, it was slow and silent. Kimura had rolled away, and the morning sun illuminated his arm half-drooping off the bed. But his face was still tilted the other way, and with some irritation Nakai proclaimed aloud that it was a decidedly unattractive sleeping face. It needed a shower badly, too. 

Kimura’s eyes opened then, and as he slowly blinked his way into the pale morning he closed the mouth which had been hanging open to expose every crooked tooth. He didn’t yawn or stretch but just nonchalantly motioned that Nakai should use the bathroom first.

Nakai went, and by the time he finished brushing his hair and teeth he had almost decided that they ought to just eat breakfast together, or rather he was thinking that he could brace himself sufficiently for such a meal. Kimura would probably accept it too, thinking that they had another concert tonight. They were going to spend the day together anyway, but it was very strange to sit down together for two meals in a row.

Even in their early days, they had seldom sat together when they were working. They never had developed such habits, even though sometimes back then they got so arbitrarily and pointlessly excited over each other that they would even slip away separately to kiss in the dimmest corner they could find. At some point, there had been only delight in that tension between them, the delicate strain of being together; and at some point, they had arrived at their current state.

 

_There was an unbearable quality to their dressing rooms immediately after the wedding. The sly fire which had always possessed him when he was with Kimura in public had not drank its fill. It had never been quite comfortable but that lack of ease had been glamorous and stimulating. Now he felt it dangerously close to stealing away his last breath of air._

_He had banked the fire always, but he had never done so out of guilt or shame - he realized that now that he was indeed ashamed. He was ashamed to possess a part of Kimura, a part that Nakai wished the new bride could touch and jerk from his unwitting fists._

_Had it been a decade since those eyes had, in a soft moment, placed themselves in his unresisting hands? Did those eyes glance at him with guilt lining their bright curves?_

_His soul hoped they did - anything to hide from indifference. His soul knew that they did and more besides, that they could feel anything but indifference._

_Kimura, too, felt it._

_When he spoke kindly to the young and over-matched cameraman, he was as conscious of his half-dressed state as Nakai was from around the corner. When he tucked in everything that needed this and straightened everything that needed that, his fingers followed the trails which had been carved by Nakai’s. That shadow, a dark but beloved one, was always there._

_Nakai knew this, he knew all of it, for when he sat around that corner with a fresh pack to clear his mind and focus, when he erased everything but the meticulous image of his guest and the rhythm of his questions - it was Kimura that he was clearing from his mind._

_They passed each other here too. There was something like anticipating exploration in it, tension as if from a dream. They were members to each other, now more than ever, they should be only members to each other, now and to forever. But memories laid forever on their skin. They never quite managed to shed that skin, and here less than ever. It was a time of relaxation as well as preparation, and in these moments they were always irrevocably in their own skins._

_Kimura came then and brushed his shoulder as usual, the quick skipping touch with a smile as always. With the old thrill and a new start, Nakai became acutely aware that he had not laid hands on Kimura since the wedding. The thrill of that touch was the same, but it was cast within a new feeling of shame, that this was undeniably his yet ought not to be. That bowed brown upper lip was his, so much so that he had not even felt the need to be possessive._

_“it's time to go,” Kimura said, in just the same way as he had before the last hundred standbys._

_Nakai smiled, as cleanly as he knew how._

_And this is what Nakai thought:  
I love you in your simple moments. _

_That was how they prepared._

 

While Kimura was finishing in the bathroom their breakfast came, Japanese-style the way they both liked it. Of course it had all been nicely arranged by the hotel kitchen, but Nakai fussed a little with the tray anyway, because he wasn’t willing to openly wait for Kimura but he didn’t want to start eating alone.

Kimura’s kiss was almost absentminded, and its familiarity was painfully rote. His ability to ignore every unpleasant reality that wasn’t an immediately pressing matter was, as always, impressive. He ate without much finesse, in large impatient surges, sighing with pleasure over the choicest morsels. They were both hungry, as a sort of sequelae of last night, so they managed to occupy themselves in silence.

In the end Nakai’s chopsticks scraped up his last grain of rice first, and he was left with dwindling coffee as his only diversion. Here was the point at which he usually wanted to be left in peace, physically at least; yet this pale morning was soothing. Though he hated that he felt this way, as ever it was with Kimura that he felt the least alone.

 

_He had once, in a crazy moment of truth, said to Kimura, half as tribute and half as shameful confession, “I’m alone… I’m afraid of being alone. You’ve been the longest thing in my life.”_

_They had been rehearsing for one more medley, and though they were both usually quick to leave rehearsals, that day they had lingered over the lyric sheets until they went back to Nakai’s home together. Kimura was between dramas, and working mostly on growing out his hair for the next one._

_Mouthing the matted end of his cigarette, he replied, “By that measure, the other members also -”_

_“The other members! Oh don’t misunderstand, I love them. I couldn’t have been with them so long if I didn’t - I loved them a little bit even before our history became something we could talk about in terms of decades, and I love them more now that we have that - but it’s love that exists because we happen to work together. That’s circumstance. But you -”_

_and Nakai turned away here, afraid that his breaths sounded like they would proceed tears._

_“We were meant to feel deeply about each other,” Kimura finished. His fingers were stable and his countenance steady._

_“I could hate you, or love you, but I’ll feel.”_

_“Have you hated me, sometimes?” he asked._

_“Yes, for trapping me - but I felt other things for you, too. That was the trap.”_

_In response, Kimura stabbed his dwindling cigarette into the almost-full ashtray and swung one leg over Nakai’s lap. They finished quickly; it had been a while._

_As he was gathering up his coat, Kimura’s often wonderfully expressive face was almost perfectly still. While he was being shown out, he looked back with that placid expression and said, “Just say it, stop talking around it. Whether or not you manage to say those words, I’m a pathetic bastard, and you’re one too. So just say it, or let me say it, and give me that satisfaction at least.”_

_Whatever response he saw in Nakai’s expression was clearly insufficient, so he seized the knob from Nakai’s hand and closed the door behind himself, leaving Nakai to face the blank white door._

_Immediately he was submerged by the desire to delete Kimura’s number, as if that would ensure they could never see each other again. He had done so once before, and he had discovered that the two of them hadn’t called in years, that the phone wasn’t the problematic connection between them._

_“See you again,” he finally mumbled to the door, and went to memorize tomorrow’s script._

 

Between them there were so many familiarities, and none of the awkwardness, yet it was all so unfailingly fresh. How old this was, and yet how much he still hungered for it. Without being conscious of where exactly the words came from, impulsively he said:

“We could go. Let’s go away, together.”

Kimura’s tongue tasted of smoke, the same smoke that shadowed his eyes now. His face was haggard now, like the smoke had dried his skin, too. He was shaking the last cigarette out of Nakai’s pack with a rough rattle as he responded, without any remarkable feeling: 

“You’re saying that now because you know there’s no way I would agree, not easily.”

“I could. I could do it.”

“Yes, we could,” Kimura said, “but I won’t. I know that I’m something significant for you. For a while I was afraid I wasn’t anything at all, you know. I wanted you, I still want you, to feel something for me, because I can’t stop feeling for you something, a lot of somethings or maybe just one great big deep one.”

“I do.”

“And that’s all I want now,” Kimura said, with his best attempt at finality.

“But we could -”

He was stopped by another kiss, wreathed in the fumes of that last cigarette. He felt his face moving, into what configuration he couldn’t say. But it seemed to place an enchantment upon Kimura, and for a moment Kimura was once again the reckless boy who had set him alight. Yet there was something new in that recklessly beautiful face which made it seem as if from a different dream than his memories - although as assured of being beloved as ever, it now received that love not with the old zeal but with something almost like an accepting pity.

And Kimura asked him, “Would you like me to pretend?” 

“When have we ever played at lies like that?”

Kimura’s embrace was heavy, and the way he rested their heads together seemed to say, “I think I want to, just for the morning.”

And Nakai wondered if it would be alright. Troubles and apprehensions seized him, until the thought came to him, clear as his most vivid dream:  
It will. The feeling is real, after all.

**Author's Note:**

> For whatever reason, I suddenly wanted desperately to read a 2top ROMANTIC EPIC and that somehow lead to me writing this, which could probably be described more accurately as 2top being not particularly romantic people for a medium number of words. So my complete failure to meet my goals is a con, but at least I actually managed to finish this (via the power of cut cut cut) which is a massive pro.


End file.
